Except for worthwhile content, nothing can raise your rankings on major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) faster than a good linking campaign. In fact, with enough good sites linking to you, you can be assured good search engine rankings. And, because a good linking campaign requires no investment or special talent, it is something all webmasters can do. Here are a few ways to find websites likely to link to you.
One way is to use your favorite search engine to find websites with information closely related to the content of your website. For example, if your website is about plants, search for terms like "plants", "gardening", and "plant feeding" to find websites whose webmasters may be interested in linking to you.
Or, you can take another route. Just identify a related site which is already highly popular, and find the websites which link to it. You can do that with a search in Google, Alltheweb or MSN for "link:" (without the quotation marks) and the complete URL of the website. For example, link:http://gardening.com (and don't forget the colon after the word "link").
Once you've identified the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their webmasters, and send an email requesting a link. To be effective, your email must:
1. be fairly brief, clearly written, and polite.
2. describe your site succinctly and without hype. Explain why visitors to the webmaster's site would benefit from visiting yours.
3. offer the webmaster an incentive to link to you. For example:
a. a link on your site.
b. the address of a website which will submit their site to 300,000 search engines, directories, and websites for free. After they link to you, tell them about the free search engine submission page.
Contact an average of at least ten webmasters a day, more if you have the time. With just a ten percent success rate, that will net you a minimum of thirty new links a month.
By using the methods discussed above, you may see a measurable increase in visitors to your site in as soon as a month or two. Significant increases in your search engine rankings may be a little slower, but they will come as more and more sites link to you.
Keep at it and, all things being equal, you can obtain the kind of search engine rankings that can transform your website from a hobby (as my wife originally referred to my first site) to a site which can pay your children's full college costs and more, as that same site now does for us.
Daniel Kane is a veteran educator. Through good content and aggressive link campaigns, his websites on online universities and financial aid have earned page one search engine rankings. You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
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